Fearing for the animals

Nearly 400 residents and animal rescuers protested outside the Town of Hempstead Animal Shelter in Wantagh last Saturday afternoon. Hope for Hempstead Shelter, a local shelter-reform advocacy group, held the rally to protest and demand a retraction of policies recently announced by the shelter.

“I think the number of people that we saw yesterday is remarkable, and I think the enthusiasm for change is something else,” said Derek Donnelly, director of Hope for Hempstead Shelter. “Never have I seen everyone so vocal — it was chant after chant after chant.”

At a Hempstead Town Board meeting nearly three weeks ago, the town announced that the shelter has stopped taking calls inquiring about animals, claiming that repeated calls have distracted shelter workers from their duties. It now requires animal inquiries to be sent via email or regular mail. The town recently issued a statement claiming that the new call inquiry policy will streamline the process of providing medical information and individual pet history to interested parties. However, Donnelly said, he believes the policy inhibits important disclosure about animals.

The town also announced that the shelter will no longer accept requests for “Do Not Destroy” tags on animals, stating that the DND policy has been replaced with a more efficient system for potential adopters to place holds on pets. According to the town, the DND label was not an effective adoption aid, since the town does not destroy adoptable pets. In its place, residents with intentions of adopting an animal can utilize “I will adopt” labels, according to the town.

However, Donnelly said, DND labels allowed animal rescuers to “buy” any animal time at the shelter while they searched for a foster or permanent home, or alternative no-kill shelter.

In addition to the town’s new policies, Donnelly said, Saturday’s protesters rallied for more efficient spending by the shelter, the implementation of better qualifications for hiring workers, allowing animal rescue workers who were banned from the shelter in October back into the facility, more action from officials such as Town of Hempstead Supervisor Kate Murray, and the termination of the shelter’s director, Pat Horan.

“Every way that you look at this, this shelter is wrong, and there’s no reason for it … there is animal abuse, neglectfulness of the animals and neglectfulness of the taxpayer,” Donnelly said. “We want a complete turnout of this shelter, and we want it turned into a model for change. I think it’s the poster child for what’s wrong with some shelters.”

Donnelly said he believes Town of Hempstead officials should have taken more action against the shelter several years ago, when it was the focus of an initial protest. Cathy LaSusa, a Hempstead resident and animal activist, said she organized two protests outside the shelter in 2006 because of needless killing, mismanagement and threats made to shelter volunteers. When volunteer rescue workers were banned from the facility nearly a year ago, more questions were raised about its policies and actions, and Hope for Hempstead has since organized several protest rallies.

Three weeks ago, a 17-year-old video surfaced, putting the facility in the national spotlight. The video, entitled “Kill the Kitty,” shows shelter employees aggressively yanking a kitten out of its carrier and laughing and making obscene gestures while preparing to euthanize the kitten. Horan can be seen in the video. The town reacted by reassigning Horan and authorizing an investigation into the video.

“In Hempstead, like in other municipalities, especially run by the same political party for so long or not, the animal shelter jobs, especially at the top, are given out based on political patronage, not animal advocacy or shelter management best-practices expertise,” LaSusa said.

Marianne Lappas, a member of Forgotten Friends Animal Rescue and the Civic Association for Shelter Accountability — which has nearly 2,000 members in its Hempstead division alone — said that many residents believe that abusive workers still work at the shelter, and reassigning Horan is not enough.

“They want the people out that are still working there, that did this abuse, and they want to have the rescue people back in — the volunteers who were in there,” Lappas said.